Balancing Organic and Paid Content Promotion: Strategies for Maximizing Reach and Engagement
Should you pay to boost posts, or should you rely on hashtags, search terms, and relatable content that will reach people interested in your content? The answer isn’t an either/or but rather a mixture of both. To succeed on social media, companies need to know how to balance organic posting with paid content promotion. Let’s look at what organic and paid content offers and how you can learn to strike the perfect balance for your brand.
What Is Organic Content?
Organic content is any content that you create and publish, whether it is a video, podcast, website content, blog article, or social media post. It is considered organic as long as you don’t pay a platform to advertise or promote the content. You might employ specific hashtags or SEO search terms to help increase the visibility of the content, but you don’t otherwise find sources outside of the content to promote it.
What if I write a blog and then post social media content to promote the blog post?
If the social media post you create is not then promoted using the platform’s ad program, both the blog post and the social media post are organic content. Organic content can still be promotional (and often is). However, you’re relying on the content itself to reach people rather than paying to have that content pushed to people on a platform.
What Is Paid Content Promotion?
Paid content promotion is what it says on the tin: content that you pay a platform to push to people on the platform. This includes ads on Google or social media sites like Facebook or YouTube. It also includes posts that you pay a platform to promote, such as promoted posts on Facebook or Twitter/X.
What if I pay a premium fee to a platform, and they increase my exposure in their algorithm?
Twitter/X offers their paid members the benefit of having their posts and comments pushed up in the algorithm. While this is money-changing hands for exposure, for the purposes of our discussion here, this still counts as organic content because you’re not having individual posts promoted by the site. This practice blurs the line between organic and paid content but still follows the practices of organic content.
Balancing Organic and Paid Content
Now that we understand the differences between organic and paid content (and where those lines can and do blur) let’s look at how to balance using both types of content. It’s important to understand that there is no one-size-fits-all to these techniques, even within the same industry. Whether you’re looking to increase traffic to your blog or website or increase engagement on social media, balancing organic and paid content is a mixture of best practices (what we’ll be talking about) and trial and error (how you will implement them).
- Make sure that your organic content is engaging and relevant and employs best practices for the platform where you post it. This means good SEO practices for blogs and websites, ideal posting times for social media, and, importantly, content that people will find relevant, interesting, and insightful.
- Create a strategy that utilizes both organic and paid content. When you look at your goals, target audience, and other factors in your marketing plan, don’t just look at your promoted content. Consider how your organic content will fit into these strategies.
- Use paid marketing to amplify your organic content. Once you have organic content posts, use paid promotions to draw attention to the content. This can include boosting social media posts or using PPC advertising to advertise your blogs through Google or on social media. While it is best to do this with well-performing content, you can also use these boosts to draw attention to new or niche content as well.
- Test, monitor, and adapt based on what you learn. A/B testing of both your ad content and your organic content will help you learn what performs well and reaches your audience and what doesn’t. It’s also important to regularly monitor your overall performance of both your organic and paid promotions and make changes to improve performance as you go.
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